The Big Question: As 'Arthur' arrives, is excess still funny?

THE BIG QUESTION is a weekly feature in which we're going to examine issues and ideas that are important to our industry as a whole.

I was talking back and forth with someone the other night about some new films we'd each seen, and I mentioned "Arthur" and the person messaged back, "I hear Arthur is not even a drunk.Â True?"

The film opens on Friday.Â And this person, who works in media, who no doubt sees a ton of advertising and marketing and trailers and clips and whatnot, still doesn't know for sure if Arthur drinks or not.

To be clear, just as in the original film, Arthur drinks pretty much non-stop through the entire film.Â He is a raging lush.Â You could call the film "Raging Lush" and it would be completely appropriate.Â He is a silly drunk.Â He's the kind of drunk who buys a Batman outfit, a real Batmobile, and then has his chauffeur run from the cops while driving dressed as Robin, plastered the entire time.Â He's the kind of drunk who just goes staggering around in public like an astronaut from the planet Privilege, having a laugh at pretty much everyone and wasted the entire time.Â He's always got a bottle or a flask or a glass in hand.Â Arthur is not just a drunk.Â He's Alpha Drunk.Â And he makes it look like loads of fun.

That's why it's sort of nonsense when there's a quick capitulation in the film's last ten minutes towards the notion of AA and sobriety and reforming his ways.Â The film doesn't earn that ending.Â It doesn't even try.Â It doesn't have any interest in painting alcohol as a negative until the moment where they have to do it because it is expected of them.Â Up to that moment, that precise about-face, "Arthur" makes drinking look like a gas.

So why is it that there's nothing in the trailers to the film or the general marketing for the movie that suggests this is that same fun-loving drunk?

Are we in an age now where excess is no longer an acceptable lifestyle for our comic leads?Â

If Johnny Depp plays Nick Charles in "The Thin Man," is he going to be dropping in for AA meetings between cases?Â Surely not.Â After all, he's played Hunter S. Thompson at full tilt, and his Jack Sparrow always seems half in the bag.Â Surely Depp is attracted to the role precisely because he gets to be Sherlock Holmes with a highball, a great detective who is also a prodigious and impressive drinker.Â That's what made William Powell's performance so iconic, that light-on-his-toes-but-oh-so-drunk charm that is woven into the fabric of what "The Thin Man" is.

I would have said the same of "Arthur," though, and I thought as the movie was chugging along that it was impressive to see a studio actually let this character simply be himself, without punishment or preaching.Â And then the ending arrives, and it's apparent that they couldn't do it.Â They had to make it a problem instead of simply part of who Arthur is.

There was a time when a guy like Foster Brooks could make a career out of being drunk.Â Dean Martin's persona in the public eye was focused on a larger-than-life version of himself, with his drinking played as endearing.Â It was an acceptable archetype, one of many that was part of most comedies.Â "The Andy Griffith Show," about as wholesome a program as I've ever seen, features Otis the town drunk, and he's presented as a predictable part of the ecosystem of Mayberry.Â Shakespeare played with the drunken fool in his works.Â That's how far back we go with the basic type, and now, today, when the character appears, he is defanged.Â Inevitably and always.Â He has to beâ€¦ right?

After all, we are smack dab in the middle of one of the most literal periods of media consumption ever, as if we've lost our ability to process even the most gentle of complex ideas.Â We seem to have made the agreement that if we see a character do something in a movie and we like that character at all, then the movie is telling us this is the way we should behave.Â At some point, we stopped understanding portrayal and confusing it with endorsement.

Personally, I think excess should be part of the vocabulary of performance, without any built in regret or "message," and denying that just draws attention to itself.Â When you see Russell Brand go through his 12-step montage, eventually reaching him beaming about his six-month chip being "his favorite coin of all time," it's hard not to roll your eyes.Â Brand is famously sober himself, and I applaud that as a choice he made.Â But Arthur, the character, does not need to be a platform for that message, no matter who's playing him.Â It is a studio note, an overly cautious note, and entirely indicative of the moment.Â There will come a time when we're on the other side of this behavior and we'll look at films from this era and that hyper-morality will be one of the things that most clearly dates the films.Â It's interesting that his movie "Get Him To The Greek" allowed him to play the character totally off the wagon and unrepentant, but that it also made him seem really sleazy and crappy in its last act.Â It's like the only way you're allowed to like the user is if they renounce it at the last convenient moment.

In preparing this article, I went looking for a photo of Russell Brand as Arthur holding a drink.Â And I couldn't find one.Â That's amazing to me.Â That is a very carefully orchestrated effort, and quite telling.Â Archetypes survive.Â Cultural cowardice passes.Â But at the moment, can you think of a better example of trying to have things both ways than an Arthur in recovery?Â Sort of says it all to me.

Well, I pretty much figured this to be the case. I wrote a review of the original film a while back in which I examined how the film is far more complex that its surface would appear, and the endless drinking plays a major role in that (the review can be found here http://experiencecinematic.blogspot.com/2010/06/arthur-gordon-1981.html). With a "redemption" for Arthur, the new film will likely play into a typical fairy tale ending rather than the more conflicted ending of the original.

I think it leads to a follow up question, which is this: Why do decisions like this get made? Are they afraid of being sued into bankrupcy? Can we trace this back to Columbine, Drew? Maybe it's potential government involvement in rating or even censoring movies that really scares them.

Not every parent is as involved in what their kids watch as you are, Drew. I applaud that involment, but it's rare. Even more rare is the post-conversation where you work out the understanding of the film with your child. Are the studios trying to be more responsible to the viewer than the artistic vision out of cultural necessity?

I don't know the answers. I don't even know any studio people to ask. I am glad you are raising the question, it puts you in a category above most of your peers and I really do thank you for it.

I'd love to see a follow up to this piece where you discuss it with some studio execs.

I often see and hear rape jokes back in comedies from the 70's or early 80's. Sometimes it's "just" behaviour from men, that is clearly sexual harassment, but played as "charming behaviour" or something like that. We don't laugh about that anymore, because we know that it isn't something to laugh at. Except when a man gets raped, which is apparently a laugh riot and often accompanied by the "Dueling Banjos" in the background, to make sure that the audience remembers that classic movie, where male rape was shown as something horrifying, but in this case you can laugh about it.Being drunk and an alcoholic is completely different than rape, but it's still serious. I lost a cousin through alcoholism. He was pretty much a vegetable in his last years. That doesn't mean that I wanna ban jokes about alcoholism from popculture, but I surely don't blame a movie for showing that it has consequences or turning its hero into a role model, by sobering him up at the end.

Is the movie rated PG-13 or R? I'm guessing why this is why Marvel didn't go all out for the "Demon in a Bottle" storyline for IM2. It's interesting because both Russel Brand and Robert Downey Jr are recovering addicts so maybe in a PG-13 movie audiences will think of the actor instead of the character. Zodiac was rated R and showed RDJ's Paul Avery character succumb to his drinking/drug use. So I think it all depends on the rating. Studios are more acceptable/favourable now a days to a character smoking a joint than being drunk but personally sometimes knowing an actor has a substance abuse problem and then that actor plays a character with similar problems it can take away from the performance. What if Mel Gibson played a raging alcoholic who shouts racist at police officers? Audiences would find that distracting which is why I'm interested to see how The Beaver plays. Anyways kind of got off the point but it all depends on the rating of the movie or maybe Russel Brand demanded that the ending include some kind of AA program. It's no accident that the dude had some personal issues with drugs in the past and goes on to be cast as pretty much the same character in "Forgetting Sarah Marshel" and "Arthur". Arthur has had a horrible marketing campaign, not one trailer or TV spot has had anything remotely funny in it. The idea of having a batmobile and bat suit is funny but the execution seems pretty lame. Anyone know if this is R or PG-13? Cause if it's PG-13 than that's the answer right there but R is another story.

Alcoholism is considered pretty harmless on screen these days compared to, say, smoking. So when they are cutting even that out of the promos, it is obvious just how sanitised everything is now. And I don't really see alcohol as such a bad look for Brand - it doesn't seem to be anything too far out of his league. But compare to Dudley Moore, who was pretty badly damaged by booze. In both cases, the off-screen reality filters through to the on-screen persona and makes a difference.

At the risk of commenting on something I haven't seen, does anyone really buy Brand as a washout, rather than someone who has worked out what drugs can do for their career? Brand is a wonderfully talented comic, no doubt, but he doesn't give off that special bittersweet vibe I see in Dudley Moore's work. That's the problem with these wreckmakes - they just sit on the surface and never get to the point. They're all brand and no content.

Brand played another type of excessive in Sarah Marshall. In that movie, though, it was sex. Lots of it. His character never really repents, and he is one of the more likable characters in the movie. I really liked how he was written and played, as a man who had found something he was excellent at and it filled him with joy.

Does the fact that he eventually hurts Sarah count as his comeuppance, if your theory is applied? He certainly ends that film as he entered it (I haven't seen Get Him To the Greek).

I know your question is a larger one but this movie has confused me from the start. Early looks were oddly catered to online movie fetish (photos released of characters in Batman and Robin costumes...I swear Star Wars t-shirts and hero cosplay outfits must have their own wings in studio costume departments these days) and now details of how faithful it is thematically and trait-wise to a movie that frankly few under 40 will recall with much clarity. Please know I'm not disparaging the original, the people involved in this one, or your questions...I just wonder who they thought they were making this movie for and marketing it to.

Wasn't the original "Arthur" the LAST straight-up "drunks are funny" movie? I seem to remember someone once making a point that part of the difference between the first "Arthur" being a smash and "On The Rocks" tanking was that Mothers Against Drunk Driving happened in-between them.